


The art of outstaying your welcome

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: Chicago PD (TV)
Genre: Broken Families, Brotherly Affection, Brotherly Angst, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Constipation, Emotionally Repressed, Gen, I'm Bad At Tagging, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sibling Rivalry, Sleep Deprivation, Strained Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-06 03:02:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21219488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: Will goes to check up on Jay after his shift per the request of his team at the Intelligence district, and while he's always happy to go and visit his little brother, he wishes that this visit was under better circumstances and that he had all the information before he came barging in throwing his two cents around.No wonder Jay is getting sick of him very fast, and why Will has the sneaking suspicion that balming Jay about things out of his control, bringing up his time as a ranger at war and talking about Jay's best friend Mouse when it's obvious Jay doesn't want to is pushing him in the distinct direction of outstaying his welcome.





	The art of outstaying your welcome

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I kinda knew that the first fic I wrote about PD would be about the Halstead Brothers- I'm a sucker for siblings. They're my one weakness. If you want me to write about a certain fandom, you're gonna need to show me the siblings. The Umbrella Academy, Percy Jackson, Shadowhunters, the Batfam. All got siblings I adore. I almost wrote something about the siblings from Twilight for god's sake (I was re-reading the first two books because I read an article that I wanted to prove for myself and I mean, the story is pretty shit and the characterisation is pretty shit, but I... love... the siblings???? Even though they're not really siblings??? I love Jasper. I'm just going to come out and say that right here). BUT I really like Jay- I like broken people, as you've probably noticed. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this. I'm not able to watch the show all the way in the land down under, so I kinda just did what I could from what I'm watched on Youtube and the things I see on Pinterest. My Pinterest by the way???? It's just my obsessions, and right now it's Power Rangers (2017), Critical Role and One Chicago. I'm obsessed. Hope you like x

It was close to late afternoon when Will knocked on his brother’s apartment door and waited impatiently for him to answer, but when he did, Will made sure to put a smile on his face and tried to make his voice light. “Oh, hey there sleepy head. I wasn’t sure if you were awake to answer the door. I was worried I’d have to use my key.”

Frowning, Jay rubbed at his eyes, giving Will a good look at his bruised and scabbed knuckles. “Remind me again why I gave you that key?” He moved over for Will to enter and closed the door when they were both safely past the threshold of the room. “Do you want a beer?”

Sticking his hands in his pockets, Will shook his head, despite knowing that Jay couldn’t see him with his head stuck in the fridge. “Nah, I’m good. I’ve still got to drive home. Not everyone gets the luxury of sleeping at their place of work whenever they get the chance.”

Jay snorted, but didn’t comment. He riffled through the fridge for a little longer before he called out, his voice slightly muffled, “Alright, so no beer. How about a coffee then? I’ve got a little milk left, and I know you doctors like that machine ground stuff, but I’ve only got instant, so if you want one then you’ll have to make do.”

Will considered refusing again, bearing in mind he’d already had two coffees for the day, but he decided against it. “Yeah, sure, why not?” He walked closer to the kitchen when Jay finally pulled his head out of the fridge, holding a mostly empty container of milk with only a few dregs of white at the bottom. “You should have told me you needed groceries. I would have done a shop for you before I came.”

“I would have done that,” Jay grunted as he struggled to remove the glass lid sealed tightly over the coffee jar. When he finally got it, it released with a satisfying _pop!_ “If I had known you were coming over. Speaking of, why are you here?"

“Do I need an excuse to come and visit my little brother?” Will asked, leaning his hip up against the counter while he watched Jay work. He would have offered to help, but he knew his brother, and he knew that Jay would have sooner gone and had a nice long conversation with their father than he would have accepted help for making a damn coffee.

With his back turned to him, Jay boiled the kettle, making a mental note that he probably needed a new one- that rattling noise didn’t sound too healthy. “You do if you never come over any other time. Which either means you need me for something, or someone’s sent you to have a chat with me about something I’ve done wrong.”

Feeling a desperate need to change the subject, Will looked his brother up and down. “Why don’t you have a shirt on?” He asked. It was true- Jay’s torso was bare and all of his scared, ruined flesh was on display, too much of it for Will’s liking, and the only thing he wore above his belt was his police badge dangling familiarity from its chain around his neck. “And you do know that that thing isn’t supposed to be a fashion accessory, right? It’s not a fancy designer necklace.”

“Neither is your lab coat or your lanyard yet I hardly ever see you without that,” Jay mumbled under his breath and Will decided he’d ignore it. Louder, Jay said, “I’m alone in my own home- I’m allowed to be comfortable every now and then. I don’t always have to be weighed down by a bulletproof vest and an itchy uniform. And if I wear my badge and I have to run out because there’s a shooter in the building, I can just throw on a jacket and go, and I won’t get another law issue by not displaying or announcing evidence of being official.”

“Sounds exhausting,” Will said, looking around the room, until he rested back on his brother. The skin on his back was covered in bruises of varying colours and ages, scabs and still healing scars and the thin white scars that he got from fighting in the war, and then his knuckles, dark and bloody and ruined. “You look like shit. What happened?”

“Oh, I look like shit?” Jay scoffed as he turned around, carefully holding the handles of two coffee cups in his hands. He carried them over to where Will was standing against the counter, secretly proud that he hadn’t spilt any. “When was the last time you slept? You look like you’d fall over with a stiff breeze.”

Chucking, Will took his coffee cup, wincing at how hot it was, but thankfully not hot enough to burn his hand. “Three days, give or take. Been pretty flat out at Med- flu seasons back in. I left work early to take a nap though so that three-day strike is about to run out, thank the heavens.”

Humming, Jay held his own coffee cup under his chin, letting the steam warm his face. “You’re welcome to stay here if you want.” He offered. “It’s pretty crazy out there. I don’t want you to fall asleep at the wheel and then get into a crash that I'll have to mop up.”

Will knew that Jay’s offer was a genuine one, but he also knew that Jay didn’t need any more hassle in his life at the moment. “Nah, I’ll be good. It’s not too far, and I’ve got to get back to Natalie and Owen. Thanks though.”

Nodding, Jay took a sip of his coffee, his mind a little distant, and Will thought he’d leave him be for a moment by taking a sip of his own coffee and resisted the urge to gag. He swallowed it down, reluctantly, and tried not to make his disgust too obvious, but he must have made a noise because Jay snapped himself out of his reverie with a blink and grinned at Will. “Gross, right? You’re just too used to the fancy stuff from the hospital cafeteria.”

“If you’ve ever been in a hospital, you know that there’s nothing fancy in the cafeteria,” Will retorted as he put the mug down. Jay took it from him with a quiet chuckle and poured it down the sink. “How can you drink that stuff? It’s like motor oil and chlorine with sugar.”

“Not all of us are so lucky to get fresh coffee on the daily,” Jay was still laughing even as he rinsed out the cup and put it in the dish rack before reaching in the cupboard for a glass and filled it up with chilled water he pulled from the fridge. “I knew you weren’t going to drink it, I just wanted to see if you would tell me or not.”

Will frowned when Jay put the glass on the counter right where the coffee cup had been and took up his own cup again, leaning his back against the stove. “You’re a sadist.” He joked, but the joke didn’t land. Jay didn’t answer, just stared blankly into his murky coffee, and Will hastily decided to change the topic again. “Why are your knuckles all beat up? I thought you cops used a gun, not your bare hands.”

Jay moved his hand from where it was laying over his stomach and looked it over carefully. “Haven’t had much need to use my gun lately,” he said. “I’ve been going to the gym down the road, getting a bit of boxing in. Sometimes I bind, usually I don’t. Depends on how I’m feeling. I haven’t lately, but nobody cares about safety regulations back there. It’s a whole building filled with fighters and screw-ups who want to forget something or hurt someone. It’s all good. Some people don’t even bind- I at least use gloves when I go against walls because I know at least one person will kick my ass if I don’t, but there are some people that don’t even go that far. The last thing I need is for Voight to kick my ass for something he doesn’t understand.”

“Right,” Will cleared his throat. They had come to the crux of the matter and he wasn’t sure how to proceed. “Uh, actually, that’s sort of why I’m here. I’ve gotten a couple of calls from the guys down at the station- Ruzek, Burgress, Upton. Even Trudy, if you can believe it. They said that you hadn’t come in to work for a few days, and were wondering if I could swing past and check up on you.”

“Ah,” Jay said slowly as if Will had just told him something very intriguing but very obvious at the same time. “I knew that had to be the reason. You’d never come all the way out here just to see how I’m doing if someone didn’t send you.”

Offended, Will put his glass down on the counter harder than he’d meant to. Jay glanced between his hand clenched around the glass and the expression on his face with a calm, calculated look. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Will demanded.

“You know exactly what it means,” Jay replied cooly. He placed his coffee down on the counter behind him and crossed both his arms over his chest, but other than that, he didn’t react to Will’s outburst. “It means that you never would have come by if you weren’t forced to, and that you don’t really care about what happens to me or how I am, but that you just want to get as much information as you can to report back to the others,” Will felt like having a screaming fit, but Jay continued before he could say anything. “But it also means that like everything else, Voight has been keeping secrets from the rest of the team and blaming it on me.”

That gave Will falter, and all the rude things he wanted to say died on his tongue. “What... what do you mean? What the hell are you talking about, Jay?”

Jay had a smug look on his face that made Will think that he’d won, and Will wanted to punch it right off his face. “Voight sent me home,” he said. “Told me to take a couple of weeks off. Well, ‘told me’ is a nice way of putting it. ‘Forced me’ more like. Not because of anything I did, but because we’re working a case about a ranger from a little after my deployment who came back and went crazy, killed a bunch of people, he’s been holding hostages in different places around Chicago. Voight wanted me to take time off to distance myself from it in case I got too attached. I’m not home because I want to be, believe me.”

“Geeze Jay, that’s rough,” Will frowned, actually taking a step back in surprise. “Did you know him? I mean, like, did you serve together?”

“I doubt it,” Jay shook his head. “Although, Voight refused to give me his name, so who the hell knows? All I know is what he did, who he is, and that I’m banned from going anywhere near the station until this whole thing blows over.”

“Why wouldn’t he let the team know?”

“The same reason why he won’t let me over there. He doesn’t want anyone involved unless they absolutely have to be, and he doesn’t consider the rest of the team knowing why I’m not coming in important enough.”

It was a very confusing and slightly shocking conversation, and now Will felt stupid, and regretted coming over here without all the facts. “Why would he do that?”

Jay sighed, and it sounded so exhausted and so genuine that Will was forced to believe it. “Because he’s Voight, and that’s just how he runs things. Always has and always will.”

“I didn’t...” Will wasn’t sure how he wanted to say it, but he knew more than anything that he did, though he also knew that his brother probably wouldn’t answer. “I didn’t know you felt guilty about joining the rangers.”

Sharply, Jay looked up at him, and there was something vicious in his eyes that Will was familiar with but couldn’t identify. “That’s because I’m not.”

The words died on Will’s tongue. “Oh... I uh, I just thought you did. I mean, I know you wanted to go and fight and everything, and I know that you got damn good at it, too, but you’re always complaining about how the others use you for your skills and expertise but never like what you have to say, so I guess I just assumed...”

“None of that has anything to do with the rangers,” Jay said decisively and Will felt guilty for even bringing it up. “I owe who I am to them, and the time I spent there was the most influential of my life. I owe everything to the rangers.”

“I know Jay, I know. I’m not doubting that,” Will held his hands up in an attempt to pacify his brother. “I just want to make sure your head is in the right place, you know? I mean, you were never really all there when you came back from the war-”

“What would you know?” Jay’s teeth were grit. “You weren’t around.”

Will took a deep breath as he continued. “-and I know that you never really talked about it with anyone, and I know you really, really hate to talk about it at all, but I feel like there’s always been this thing inside of you just waiting to get out, you know? And I doubt all this stuff with the rouge ranger is doing that any good, so I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t going to... you know. Go off the rails. Do something you might regret. Maybe... maybe Voight had good reason to suspend you for the time being?”

When Jay didn’t say anything, Will started looking for exits. He knew what his brother was like, better than anyone else at the Intelligence department ever could, and he knew that this time, he pushed too far. Jay was grinding his back teeth together, his eyes dark and stormy, drilling holes into the tiles. “I think it’s about time for you to leave, Will. Don’t psychoanalyse me. If I wanted that, I’d have gone to Med and asked Doctor Charles for a consultation. You might have forgotten dad’s lessons about not outstaying your welcome, you know, in between the parties and the drinking and the girls and all that.”

Will started backing up, slowly, one foot behind the other. He didn’t like that look in his brothers' eyes. He knew that sometimes his brother could be... volatile. “Easy Jay, I’m leaving. Just... maybe you should get in touch with someone about all this. Maybe Mouse? You haven’t spoken about him in a while.”

At the mention of Mouse, Jay’s face closed off entirely, and Will knew he’d ruined it. “Don’t talk about Mouse.”

“Jay, come on man-”

“Get out.”

It wasn’t loud, and it was such a simple command, but it held weight and power that Will wouldn’t have thought possible if it weren’t directed at him. He knew some of what Jay did to get through the war, but that look on his face was downright scary. “Fine. _Fine_. But you know what, Jay? You’re a prick to everyone who tries to help you. If you keep going like this, you’re going to have no one.”

“What did I just say about psychoanalysing me?” Jay snapped to Will’s retreating back. “Go tell all my co-workers that I’m still alive and not dead in a ditch drowning on my own vomit, or they’re going to keep calling you and who knows, maybe they’ll start asking you out for dinner and joining them on stake outs or coming down to the station to consult with them-”

“God, I get it,” Will shouted, spinning around to face Jay just before he left the house. “You don’t want help, you don’t want to talk about it, and you don’t want people to care about you. I _get_ _it_. But you better start getting used to disappointment, just because you don’t want people to care about you doesn’t mean that they’re going to give you what you want, because even if I call up the district right now and tell them not to call you and to leave you alone, they’ll be over here before I even pull out of the driveway, and you’re damn lucky that people care enough about you to make sure you’re still alive, you _jackass_.”

The door slammed behind him and Will was gone, but Jay couldn’t help but call out his final retort, “Well I never wanted help so you’re all wasting your breath!”

He heard Will’s car start up and squeal out of the car park, and he glanced down at the glass of cool water with condensation sliding down the sides, and he slapped it off the counter with a guttural roar from deep within his chest and he couldn’t help but wonder what it would take for people to leave him alone.


End file.
